1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a human-computer interface for displaying and operating on data elements in a computer database that describe the characteristics of physical objects existing outside of the data base. This human-computer interface graphically represents the locations of its corresponding physical objects in physical space and uses graphical icons as a means by which the user can associate one data element with another in a hierarchical relationship. The contents and properties of container object parent data elements may be viewed in a manner analogous to the means by which the corresponding physical objects could be opened for deeper views of their contents and properties.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Graphical user interfaces (GUIs), including representation of data elements through icons, are in common use in a variety of computer applications. However, prior art GUIs fall short in making visually clear the correspondence between data elements and objects in the physical world represented by those data elements. They are particularly weak in visually depicting the nature of parent-child relationships among data elements to elucidate their correspondence to hierarchical, or container, relationships among the physical objects they represent.
In prior art graphical user interfaces, the "opening" of an icon on a computer video display through use of a computer pointing mechanism, such as a mouse, results in the opening of a computer application (e.g., a word processing application comes up on the screen when the user "double clicks" on its icon), the display of other icons from which corresponding applications can be opened (e.g., as occurs when the user opens an icon representing a program group), or the display of similar icons with different text labels depicting a subordinate relationship to the selected icon (as occurs in utilities for navigating to particular files existing in hierarchical relationships). These mechanisms do not represent physical relationships of physical objects existing in three-dimensional space that are being represented as data elements in a computer data base.
Since some computer applications require graphical representation of "real world" objects, including their relative positions in space, and since the real world objects sometimes contain other objects, it is important for the computer application user to be able to see the location of the container object (parent data element) in a spatial representation as well as the contents (child data element or object) of the container, the properties of the container, and the properties of the objects it holds.